A straight couple whining because they can’t have a civil partnership? Give me strength!

ONE of my friends had a leg blown off in the Tube at Edgware Road when he was caught up in the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. Another suffered the agony of losing two of her children to cot deaths, caused by the same genetic disorder. Her grief was compounded after the second tragedy when she was locked up for three days and nights in a police cell, under suspicion of murdering the baby she had longed for and adored.

Both these friends bore their unimaginable ordeals with extraordinary fortitude, betraying hardly a trace of selfpity or bitterness over the cruelty and injustice done to them.

Not so Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, who seem mighty sorry for themselves over the hand they’ve been dealt. So wronged do they feel — so ‘humiliated and upset’, to use their own words — that they’re planning to seek public donations to fund a judicial review of the way they’ve been treated.

Meanwhile in the Commons today, Tory backbencher Tim Loughton, a former junior minister for children, is proposing a private member’s Bill to amend the law so that nobody will have to endure what Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld have been through again.

Humiliated

Readers of a sensitive disposition, who recoil from descriptions of injustice and man’s inhumanity to man, should turn the page now. Even the more flint-hearted among you may be well advised to have hankies at hand before I go on to explain this tragic pair’s suffering.

Ready? Here goes. Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld are a heterosexual couple who are about to become parents and want to formalise their union. But they don’t want to get married, not even in a civil ceremony, because both are ardent feminists who regard marriage as ‘patriarchal’ — that is, a form of social organisation in which the father is the supreme authority in the family (oh, how I wish they were right!).

No, what they want is a civil partnership, and nothing else will do for them. But under the law as it stands, they can’t have one, because our legislators have decreed that civil partnerships are only for couples of the same sex.

Not fair, they say. Viciously illiberal discrimination! What about equal rights?

But let them take up their own story. Writing a joint article in the Guardian (where else?) they say: ‘Being civil partners would give us greater legal rights and responsibilities without the social expectations, pressures and traditions surrounding marriage.’

Though they were well aware of the law, they decided to make a stand. So on October 1, they went to Chelsea old town hall in London, seeking to give ‘notice of intention’ to form a civil partnership — the equivalent of publishing the banns before a marriage.

‘But we were refused by the registrar, who said it was “not worth her job” to perform an act of civil disobedience. We sympathised with her position and sentiment, but her supervisor was less friendly. He said we were not even entitled to a written explanation, and told us to leave the premises.

‘The experience left us feeling humiliated and upset, but also asking the question: why is it that rights and privileges that are extended to one group of people are being denied to others?’

Give me strength! Go through the law with a fine-toothed comb, and you’ll find absolutely nothing of any substance to distinguish between the rights, privileges and responsibilities of married couples and civil partners.

They have the same exemption from inheritance tax on the property they leave to their other halves, the same access to the promised married couples’ allowance, the same right to consideration in immigration appeals and the same liability to pay alimony after a split.

Even the orders of ceremony for civil marriages and civil partnerships are almost identical (though civil partners are not legally obliged to utter the words ‘husband’ or ‘wife’). Indeed, contracting parties to either institution are free to write their own words for most of the ritual — including the vows. So if Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld went through a civil marriage, they could presumably promise each other to reject patriarchy and embrace feminism for as long as they both shall live.

Gripe

True, same-sex couples are banned by law from getting married in CofE churches, while other religious organisations are free to choose whether or not to perform gay weddings. But most equality campaigners rightly accept this as essential to religious freedom — and anyway, it doesn’t affect Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld, who can marry wherever they jolly well like, as long as it’s licensed.

Indeed, even this moaning couple — both academics, he 38, she 33 — seem to have trouble identifying exactly why they feel so hard done-by.

According to Mr Keidan, their objection to marriage is partly to do with its history as a union in which women were exploited for their domestic and sexual services.

He’s also annoyed that there’s only space on the English marriage register for the names and occupations of the fathers of the bride and groom. (On our wedding certificate it says that my wife’s father was a baker. But this was because the priest misread the handwriting on her birth certificate. In fact, he was a banker.)

But if this really offends Mr Keidan, all he need do is whisk his intended off to Scotland or Northern Ireland, where they’ll be asked to name all four of their parents.

Still scratching around for a gripe, he adds: ‘It’s almost about the social expectations of marriage — the father giving away his daughter to the groom, hen and stag events, the virginal white dresses. That’s not the type of relationship we want.’

But hang on. Whoever said he must have such a relationship if he opts for marriage? Shouldn’t someone tell him that Harriet Harman herself could give away the bride, if that’s what he and Rebecca want? Nor is there any obligation to stage a hen or stag night — and if the fancy takes them, there’s nothing in law to stop either of them from wearing a bright red tutu to the ceremony.

Silly

Isn’t the truth of the matter that, like so many others these days, Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld are simply inventing a grievance where none exists, making a massive fuss about nothing, just for the pleasure of feeling a warm glow of righteous feminist indignation?

Mind you, I can’t for the life of me understand why David Cameron, having mocked traditional ideas of the family by legalising gay marriage, now appears so reluctant to let heterosexual couples form civil partnerships.

Challenged on the subject last year, he told the Commons: ‘I think we should be promoting marriage rather than looking at any other way of weakening it.’

Yes, I can see how allowing people of the same sex to get hitched makes the word marriage mean something very different from the way it had been understood for millennia. And though I soon came round to the idea of civil partnerships, I don’t think old fogeys like me will ever quite accept that a man can be married to a man, or a woman to a woman, in any sense of the word we fully recognise.

Witness the difficulty MPs suffered when they tried to come up with a legal definition of how a lesbian marriage could be consummated. They couldn’t. That’s what happens when legislation clashes with the human condition and the facts of life.

But now that Mr Cameron has sold that pass, how can it conceivably be said to weaken marriage if Parliament redresses the non-existent grievance of Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld? It simply doesn’t matter, one way or the other. But then why waste politicians’ and judges’ time on it?

My own advice to this exhibitionist couple, and to anyone else with a fake grievance, is to stop being so silly — and thank their lucky stars that, in this cruel and unjust world, they’ve suffered nothing more serious to make a fuss about.